Stephen Daisley

Well, that didn’t take long. Barely had the ink dried on a lawyer’s letter from Joanna Cherry than The Stand comedy club performed a screeching U-turn on its decision to cancel an event featuring the SNP MP. Cherry had been due to appear in an ‘In conversation with…’ interview at the Edinburgh Fringe in August. However, The Stand nixed the function last week, saying ‘a number of The Stand’s key operational staff, including venue management and box office personnel, are unwilling to work on this event’. Cherry has become persona non grata among progressives for raising concerns about the interaction of legal gender reform and the rights of women and girls.

I would like to go back to disagreeing with Joanna Cherry, thank you very much. Not so long ago, it was easy enough. She was an SNP MP, beloved by the party’s grassroots, and one of the most articulate advocates for Scottish independence. She was also a lawyer, and I really don’t think that sort of thing should be encouraged.   Then something happened: she started to talk out of turn about transgender ideology and its impact on women’s rights. In doing so, this left-leaning lesbian has been vilified as a bigot, shunned within her party, and subjected to appalling online abuse. Her latest punishment has been the cancellation of her ‘In conversation with…’ event at the Edinburgh Fringe.

The Guardian thinks of itself as Britain’s fearless liberal conscience, trigger-sensitive to racist ‘dog whistles’ in the language and editorial judgements of everyone except itself. It takes a special interest in cartoons published by right-of-centre newspapers which are accused of bigotry.  When the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun ran a cartoon depicting Serena Williams throwing a tantrum, the Guardian reported that News Corp had ‘come under global condemnation for publishing a racist, sexist cartoon’, supplementing multiple news stories with several condemnatory op-eds.

Israel is marking 75 years of its existence in one of the most difficult peacetime periods the country has ever seen. Peacetime is a relative concept in the Middle East but the past six months have been extraordinarily trying for Israelis and their friends overseas. Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power 16 months after being ousted by an improbable coalition of left and right, secular and Islamist – everyone except the voters. But his comeback was only possible by doing a deal with the devil and bringing the far right into his government. Unsavoury allies like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the Laurel and Hardy of Israeli ultranationalism, have proved comically inept in ministerial office but have also become more extreme with power.

The Foreign Office has seven ministers, 16,000 employees, an £11bn credit card and one of these days it might get itself a foreign policy. If the trailed excerpts of James Cleverly’s speech to the Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet are to be believed, the Foreign Secretary will articulate the government’s pivot back towards Beijing. Cleverly will reportedly declare that ‘no significant problem… can be solved without China’. He will say that while ‘it would be clear and easy – perhaps satisfying – for me to declare a new cold war and say that our goal is to isolate China’, it would be ‘wrong’, ‘a betrayal of our national interest’ and even a ‘wilful misunderstanding of the modern world’.  This pro-China tilt does not come out of the blue.

All political careers end in failure but Humza Yousaf has managed to begin his there. Three weeks ago, he clinched the leadership of the SNP in a 52-48 per cent photo finish. Since then, he has deepened divisions within his party by shunning MSPs who failed to support his leadership bid, launched a legal challenge to Westminster to restart his government’s unpopular gender reforms, and watched as police raided Nicola Sturgeon’s home and arrested Peter Murrell, her husband and the SNP’s former chief executive, amid a probe of party finances.   Tuesday was supposed to mark a ‘reset’, because Yousaf’s leadership is in such dire straits that, less than a month in, it already needs resetting.

Humza Yousaf's decision to challenge the British government in court over Scottish gender laws is a tactical play. And yet it confirms just how little the new First Minister knows about tactics. Yousaf is having a terrible old time of it. Almost half of SNP members voted against him becoming leader. He has stuffed his government with loyalists: just one of his 27 ministers endorsed his leadership rival. The SNP’s finances are under police investigation, former chief executive Peter Murrell was arrested, the home he shares with Nicola Sturgeon raided by officers, and Yousaf only just learned that his party’s auditors quit months ago. (Neither Murrell nor anyone else has been charged with any offence.

Humza Yousaf’s government will be defined by two legacies, Nicola Sturgeon’s and his own as health secretary. The Sturgeon legacy can only be understood by looking at the distance between the previous first minister’s rhetoric and her record. Sturgeon was always heavy on mission statements but light on delivery. During the leadership election, Yousaf initially embraced his designation as the ‘continuity candidate’ then pivoted to reject the label. That ambivalence reflects not only the shifting tactics of a troubled campaign but the political realities that the victor would inherit.

Westminster is not plotting to steal powers from Holyrood or roll back devolution, contrary to the campfire stories the Scottish establishment likes to scare itself with. In reality, neither Labour nor the Tories are interested in considering what impact Holyrood has had on the Union.  It’s peculiar, given both parties have self-interested reasons for rethinking the arrangements of devolution. Less than a decade into the experiment, the SNP had seized control of Holyrood and unilaterally renamed the Scottish executive ‘the Scottish government’. The party has used the Scottish government, and the UK civil servants who staff it, to plot both independence and a separate Scottish foreign policy, despite both matters being reserved to Westminster.

Kate Forbes has reportedly quit the Scottish government after new SNP leader Humza Yousaf offered her the job of rural affairs secretary. Given that Forbes has been finance secretary for the past three years, and a junior finance minister for two years before that, it’s a fairly transparent play: humiliate her into quitting government altogether.  After all, it would be the equivalent of Rishi Sunak reshuffling Jeremy Hunt to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Arguably it’s worse, because Forbes spent years rebuilding relations with the business community, which had been good under Alex Salmond but fell off a cliff once Nicola Sturgeon took over.

They have thrown everything at Kate Forbes. She has been subjected to a secular inquisition marked by triviality and partiality. Journalism is a trade neither teeming with religious believers nor one well-equipped for Biblical exegesis, and it shows.  ‘Gotcha’ interrogation has focused on scriptural provisions offensive to progressive attitudes pervasive among journalists (e.g. on homosexuality and fornication) and not other teachings with as much potential bearing on policymaking, such as the iniquities of the rich and powerful or the superior virtue of the poor and meek.

Nicola Sturgeon’s valedictory address to the RSA was her ‘And now we turn to the liars…’ speech. The outgoing SNP leader’s remarks were nominally about inequality and climate change but she was really there to talk about the distorting impact of social media on democratic politics. Given her departure was possibly hastened by the pushback against her Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which saw women’s rights campaigners and others organise via social media, it’s understandable that the First Minister would feel a little irked by these disruptively democratic platforms.  The ‘nature of the discourse’, Sturgeon opined, was ‘undermining our ability… to address the big issues’.

And so the Nicola Sturgeon years end with neither a bang or a whimper but with one pitiful desk-clearing after another. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the chief executive of the SNP, has announced his resignation. It comes after Murray Foote, the party’s chief spin doctor, walked on Friday. He had been rubbishing media reports that the party’s membership rolls had shrunk by 30,000 since 2021.  Then, Ash Regan, a candidate in the leadership contest to replace Sturgeon, questioned the integrity of that process and demanded the membership numbers be made public. Backed into a corner, SNP HQ released the figures, which showed a drop in members of 32,000 over the last two years.

The Chancellor’s decision to slap a ten per cent duty hike on Scotch whisky is bad economics. Exports broke the £6 billion mark last year and the industry employs 11,000 people in Scotland while supporting 42,000 jobs across the UK. But whisky is a luxury item in a competitive global market where increases in retail price impact consumer behaviour. Five of the top ten export destinations by value (United States, France, Germany, Japan and Spain) are economies experiencing sharp declines in household income.  Driving up the industry’s costs also hampers one of the biggest export challenges facing Scotch whisky today: breaking India. Per bottle sales rose 60 per cent last year but Scotch still only accounts for two per cent of the Indian whisky market.